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chapter฀5 Mary฀Johnston,฀Ellen฀Glasgow,฀฀ and฀the฀Evolutionary฀Logic฀of฀฀ Progressive฀Reform We are growing away from the four-footed—we are growing away from our sister the gibbon and our brother the chimpanzee—we are growing—we are changing—we feel the heavens over us and a strange new life within us—we are passing out, we are coming in—we need a new word. —Mary Johnston, Hagar (1913) By 1913, the writing careers of Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow were firmly established. Johnston’s historical romances To฀Have฀and฀to฀Hold,฀Audrey,฀Sir฀ Mortimer,฀Lewis฀Rand, and The฀Long฀Roll had appeared on the best-sellers’ lists in 1900, 1902, 1904, 1908, and 1911 respectively. Glasgow’s realist work did not meet quite as much popular success—Deliverance made the best-sellers’ list in 1904 and The฀Wheel฀of฀Life landed a spot in 1906—but her work was taken more seriously by literary critics who praised its realistic impressionism and “masculine virility.”1 As writers and close friends, Johnston and Glasgow took pride in their genteelVirginian heritage even as they espoused their commitment to socialism, women’s suffrage, racial tolerance, and progressive reform.2 Yet it was not until the publication of Johnston’s Hagar (1913) and Glasgow’s Virginia (1913) and Life฀ and฀Gabriella (1916) that solving the woman question would be presented as the answer to the New South’s economic and social turmoil.3 Johnston’s Hagar, with its contemporary setting, moments of documentary-realist style, and blatant advocacy of the New Woman cause, surprised readers and critics accustomed to her earlier, less polemical historical romances. While less overtly political in its project, Glasgow’s Virginia, her first novel to focus on the development of a female protagonist,offered readers a naturalist narrative that exposed the futility of the southern lady’s life based solely on romantic and maternal love.Three years later in Life฀and฀Gabriella, Glasgow crafted a southern heroine who is compelled to struggle alone to support herself and her two children after being deserted by her feckless, philandering husband. 05.125-151_Patt.indd฀฀฀125 8/8/05฀฀฀10:44:03฀AM 126฀ beyond฀the฀gibson฀girl As Johnston and Glasgow were writing their novels of the New South, they not only,like Wharton,relied on the philosophical,scientific,and social scientific literature of race, gender, and evolution but on a number of related discourses, all of which had as a foundation not just the changing socioeconomic order that Wharton addressed but the special place of the South in that order and in the national rhetorics of progress.They employed a series of extended conceits; Glasgow uses electricity (to signify modern, potentially disruptive energy) and Johnston uses the bridge (to signify both the new coalitions the new age demands as well as the industrial development the South seeks). Both use the more general trope of wave motion to suggest the power and potential chaos of that new energy; bridges traverse over it, electricity rides it. Their arguments about the “new” counteract some of the absences and errors of their northern counterparts. Both Glasgow and Johnston cast a New Woman—a New Woman with varying degrees of commitment to feminism,4 socialism, progressivism, and mysticism —as the figure best able to assuage the racial and economic anxieties of the developing New South. Defined principally by their genteel status and their desire for both economic independence and gradual social reform, these New Woman protagonists promise none of the social upheaval of an Undine Spragg. They are kin, in many respects, to what Julia Magruder describes as “The Typical Woman of the New South,” who is not the typical new woman—in no section of the country had the “new-woman movement gained ground so slowly,” but “an evolution of the past—an upward growth,a higher development” (Magruder 1687). Typified by the Christy Girl, she is proud but more “offhand in her manners with men” (1685). Similarly, Hagar’s innate gentility tempers her advocacy of women’s enfranchisement, progressive socialism, and transcendental mysticism such that it arouses only immediate family tension rather than the specter of widespread class conflict or marital strife. Indeed, Johnston and Glasgow express far less ambivalence toward the emergence of the New Woman than either Wharton, Hopkins, Cather, or Sui Sin Far because their new southern women retain a spiritual commitment to a southern agrarian past,which sustains vestiges of the old social...

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